Is Big Media the real Election loser?

Judged by its own high standards, The Sun had a poor election. Yes, we got the UK Debt Clock, The Dossier That Shames Labour and the argument that readers should vote Tory in order to save Page 3.

On the eve of polling day, however, the Sun invited Simon Cowell to sharehis vision for a new Britain.

The ventriloquism didn’t stop there. On polling day, the Sunsuperimposed Cameron’s face on Obama’s iconic Hope poster from the 2008 US presidential election.

The contrast between an Old Etonian descendant of King William IV and America’s first black president yawned deep and wide. Much was lost in translation.

Anyone can have a bad day at the office. Yet the contrast between The Sun’s current weakness of mind and the way in which it used to approach elections remains striking.

Once upon a time, Britain’s biggest-selling daily newspaper could channel the public mood without any help from outsiders or visual clichés. Famously, Kelvin MacKenzie once put a politician’s head inside a lightbulb and told readers: “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain turn out the lights."

These days, Wapping also seems less confident when it is described as a partisan force. When Simon Kelner at the Independent published a front page ad during the campaign that declared “Rupert Murdoch won't decide this election -- You will”, he received an unannounced visit from James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks.

Brows were furrowed and expletives hurled during the ensuing meeting. In the old days, Wapping would have ignored such provocations.

The Sun wasn’t alone in experiencing problems. This was far from a vintage election for Big Media.

Televised debates caught the public’s imagination. But the format prevented proper cross-examination. Broadcasters and newspapers succeeded in presenting the election as a spectacle. But when it came to policy, failure was the norm.

Only three questions mattered in this election. First: where has the deficit come from? (Out-of-control public expenditure or bank bail-outs?) Second: how serious is it? (Are we like Greece? If not, why not?) Third: how rapidly can public spending be cut without endangering recovery? (Was Gordon Brown exaggerating the risks of cutting budgets?)

To be sure, these were complex questions, involving numbers. Perhaps the public wasn’t interested in the answers. Certainly, politicians failed to supply them. In turn, the media failed to hold them to account.

When the Institute for Fiscal Studies published its 37-page analysis of the parties’ economic policies on 27 April, Big Media reacted like a bunch of work-shy school kids. Grateful that an older sibling had done their homework, they utterly failed to develop the story any further.

Instead, as usual, Big Media devoted too much space stories filed from plains, trains and battle buses. Mimicking television, they went in search of gaffes. In Rochdale, they chanced upon one, when Gordon Brown called 65-year old Gillian Duffy “that bigoted woman”.

Voters didn’t seem to care. The opinion polls barely flickered in response. On election night, Labour re-captured the seat from the Liberal Democrats with a slim majority.

The prioritization of gaffes over policy analysis remains symptomatic of a classic problem that’s becoming increasingly acute. At a basic level, what’s at stake is the inability of news organisations to devote sufficient resources to explaining complex issues.

Here’s the first par of a Jeff Jarvis jeremiad from early 2007 that diagnoses the nature of the problem:

[Newspapers] try to cover everything because they used to have to be all things to all people in their markets. So they had their own reporters replicate the work of other reporters elsewhere so they could say that they did it under their own bylines as a matter of pride and propriety. It’s the way things were done. They also took wire-service copy and reedited it so they could give their audiences the world. But in the age of the link, this is clearly inefficient and unnecessary. You can link to the stories that someone else did and to the rest of the world. And if you do that, it allows you to reallocate your dwindling resources to what matters. . .

In an election where the media failed, did social media make a difference? If it did, the difference wasn’t huge. Our political parties used the web in ways that veered from the shambolic to the disinterested. Where a strategy existed, it had less to do with conversation than carpet-bombing.

The Tories spent more money and met with more success, but their performance was far from flawless. As the election approached, Cameron told the Guardian: "I'm not on Facebook, I don't tweet. Social media, I don't really get. Politically I know it's a great opportunity; personally, I don't want to be 'poked' or whatever it is."

It showed. More broadly, there was no Howard Dean-style popular uprising, financed through PayPal. The slate of independent candidates overseen by Martin Bell seemed to sink without trace. Facebook, to its credit, got 14,000 users to download voter registration forms. This remains a drop in the ocean.

Yet at the periphery, however, a few interesting things did happen.

At the last general election, in 2005, Twitter didn’t exist and Facebook was a US-only phenomenon. Five years on, 36,000 users of Twitter commented on the first leaders’ debate.

That’s less than half of the population of an average British constituency. Yet newsrooms have learned to treat Twitter as a weather vane. So when the Cameron-supporting nationals over-reached themselves with a search for dirt in the wake of Nick Clegg’s first debate victory, there was a pause for thought. On Twitter, the sarcastic hashtag #nickcleggsfault emerged as a warning for editors.

The remixing of election posters represented another flashing red light for the digital immigrants who run election campaigns.

Maurice Saatchi, the adman drafted in by the Conservatives halfway through the campaign, believes in virtuoso copywriting above anything else. His motto -- "brutal simplicity" -- represents the opposite of conversation. Instead, Saatchi specialises in the insertion of "one precise thought into the customer’s mind".

Yet brutal simplicity proved vulnerable to subversion. On Facebook, by the end of the campaign, the group called Vandalised Conservative Billboards (123,000 members) was more popular than party political groups for the Conservatives (74,500), the Lib Dems (74,000) or Labour (33,000). Clifford Singer’s site, My David Cameron, did well, too.

The glory days of Saatchiesque sloganeering are over, suggested Singer. No doubt grateful that Labour had far less to waste on billboards than the Tories, Alastair Campbell agreed with him.

Another symptom from the periphery: in south London, where I live, visiting the web sites of local newspapers on election day proved pointless. There was no effort to put together a narrative of local issues. So far as dozens of columnists were concerned, the elections didn’t seem to exist.

Yes, the posts I read were refracted through the authors’ personal loyalties. But after reading the national press for a couple of decades, I’m accustomed to this. In the empty space created by the decline of local newspapers, bloggers have emerged as a useful and thoughtful alternative.

After the election, Big Media returned to its comfort zone in the Westminster village. Expensively-produced graphics outlined the scale of our indecision. Flitting like crazed pigeons between 19th century buildings, correspondents resumed the business of pecking nuggets of spin from the ether.

On live television, Adam Boulton of Sky News almost came to blows with Alastair Campbell. The Daily Telegraphargued that Brown’s resignation represents the start of a "coup" designed to "nullify" the result of a general election.

Less confident than ever, Big Media is trying to forget that this was an election in which it failed to play the role expected of it in a democracy.

The new ways remain weaker, and less influential, than anyone guessed. On dangerous ground, the old ways persist.

Edited by Nate Lanxon

Comments

very interesting analysis. The TV debates really muddied the water I felt. Some of it was compelling viewing but took the debate further away from policy than ever.Overall the media performance has been poor, from the social media echo chamber to the ludicrous national press coverage, the reaction to Nick Clegg's surge in popularity in particular. The Mail practically called him a Nazi, pot, kettle etc